Travel Lodge Kings Cross

Travel Lodge Kings Cross     

The valley is soon to celebrate the Malaila Ceremony This normally takes place in March or April with great celebration and rejoicing. The Kuomboka is a well known ceremony in Western province in which the King and his family and retinue move in response to the seasonal flooding of the Zambezi from his Palace at Lelui to his dry season Palace at Limalunga. It was and is for us a Kuomboka of sorts more especially as it is part of our greater move back to the valley for the dry season and till this movement is reversed again in November.

 We had to reverse them off the barge at night by the light of one of the Mongu taxis. A number of our staff embark onto an aircraft in Kalabo whilst our small team undertook the last major water journey across the Zambezi flood plain this passed uneventfully although a little Huckleberry Finnish with our vehicles being loaded onto a barge used for carrying cattle from Kalabo to Mongu across fifty kilometres and twelve hours of the Zambezi flood plain. Our vehicles were carefully packed for the journey of close to fifteen hundred kilometres from the Liuwa to Nkwali in the Luangwa. And the first hints of bushfires. Spiralling flights of white pelicans over the pans and lagoons.

 Herds of wildebeest are now starting to move to the west and north.  As our May and June safaris on the Liuwa Plains slide into that delicious after flavour of memories, together go the endless grasslands fast turning brown with the season.